


earn your keep

by sevenfoxes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Heist AU, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, bank robbers au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 09:00:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1893108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy’s in the living room of the apartment they’ve bunkered down in for the evening.  It’s nearly a hundred degrees and they’re on the fifth floor, so Peggy’s stripped to her brassiere and a pair of Bucky’s shorts, and Steve tries hard - tries really hard - not to look at the swell of her breasts, but even now he can’t help it.  She’s been with them near three months and he still can’t control himself.  It makes him feel like he’s fourteen again, the skinny little kid that used sit at the other end of the room while Bucky felt up his date, lifted her skirt for him so Steve could just spot the edge of whatever colour panties she had worn special for Buck.</p><p>But he’s not.  He’s twenty-four and his strange growth spurt at seventeen made Bucky the small one.  One of life’s little ironies, he guesses.  But Bucky’s still better at picking up women, charming his way between their thighs, which is how they ended up with Peggy.  Except he’s pretty sure that she was the one who picked him. Them.</p><p>Not many dames who’d find tagging along with two lawless men a fruitful venture.  But then again, Peggy’s not most dames.  And they’re not most lawless men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	earn your keep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LariaGwyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LariaGwyn/gifts).



> For LariaGwyn's tumblr prompt, "Bucky/Peggy/Steve heist AU". When it hit 3500 words, I was like, YEAH, this really isn't a tumblr fic anymore. When it hit 5K, I laughed at my total inability to employ brevity in regard to my writing anymore. Whatever. OLD TIMEY HEISTS, Y'ALL.

Peggy’s in the living room of the apartment they’ve bunkered down in for the evening.  It’s nearly a hundred degrees and they’re on the fifth floor, so Peggy’s stripped to her brassiere and a pair of Bucky’s shorts, and Steve tries hard - tries really hard - not to look at the swell of her breasts, but even now he can’t help it.  She’s been with them near three months and he still can’t control himself.  It makes him feel like he’s fourteen again, the skinny little kid that used sit at the other end of the room while Bucky felt up his date, lifted her skirt for him so Steve could just spot the edge of whatever colour panties she had worn special for Buck.

But he’s not.  He’s twenty-four and his strange growth spurt at seventeen made _Bucky_ the small one.  One of life’s little ironies, he guesses.  But Bucky’s still better at picking up women, charming his way between their thighs, which is how they ended up with Peggy.  Except he’s pretty sure that _she_ was the one who picked him. Them.

Not many dames who’d find tagging along with two lawless men a fruitful venture.  But then again, Peggy’s not most dames.  And they’re not most lawless men.

At first, it had just been a way to pay for Ma’s medicine.  Christian charity buys you a dank bed in a hospice run by the rather unkind nuns at St. Thomas, but for the kind of care his Ma needed, the only currency they accepted was green.  The kind he didn’t have.

Bucky had been the one with the solution.  Steve had known Bucky’d been pulling small jobs outside the city, the kind that kept him flush with cash and a pretty thing looking for a bit of rebellion under one arm.  At first, Bucky had offered to give him the cash, but Steve wasn’t looking for a handout.  It had seemed wrong at the time to benefit without consequence off the sins Bucky would be committing on his behalf; Steve knew Bucky would sell his soul to the devil for him, and taking advantage of that, of him?  Steve would never.  He’d earn his keep.

The first couple had been small jobs too - late night smash and grabs from places wealthy enough not to be hurt by the thefts (and covered by insurance either way), but not big enough to set the cops on their tail.  And it had been enough - enough to keep his mother in a hospital bed with a tube in her arm and her beautiful eyes clear and open.

Then she had died.  Now, he can’t blame her for the choices he’s been making.  She’d turn over in her grave if she could see the man he’s become.  But he’s never been good at much else.

Maybe once he’d just been good.  Now he’s not sure what he is.

“Eight hundred and sixteen,” Peggy says, dropping the last of the bills into the pile.  Steve loves her British accent.  When she’s out, she drops it completely, far too conspicuous anywhere but in a large city, but here, alone with them, it comes out.  It’s been burned away a bit from her years living in New York City with her family (her father’s a diplomat of some kind - the type of man who has _Sir_ before his name, or at least as far as Steve has been able to parse), but it’s unmistakable.

“Nice,” Bucky says, leaning over to kiss her neck.  His mouth lands right over a bruise there that’s just starting to heal.  Bucky always did like markin’ up his girls, though he does it less with Peggy.  Steve’s been getting the impression she doesn’t care much for his possessive streak, though he’s seen his share of small mouth-shaped bruises on Bucky as of late, too.

They never do it in front of him though.  Bucky’s always been real demonstrative with his girls, but with Peggy, he holds himself in strange restraint.

“Better head down to Tennessee to give the Widow her due,” Peggy says, leaning back against the couch.  It sags a bit under her weight, and Steve watches rapt as a fat drop of sweat beads down the back of her neck and onto the tacky, flowered fabric.

“Fuckin’ fifteen percent,” Bucky whines.  The Widow sends them jobs and in return, they pay fealty to her.  She’s got most of the gangs of the eastern seaboard working for her; her information is beyond reproach, and since they’ve started taking her jobs, their loot from each job has more than doubled, especially since she’s been sending them on Sanders & Son Co. heists.

(It was only after they started targeting Sanders that Peggy came on board.  Neither he nor Bucky have ever gotten a straight answer as to why she’s joined them, but she’s got a lead foot and the best skills behind a steering wheel that either of them have ever seen, so they’ve just learned to stop asking questions.)

“You’re the one who made the deal, Barnes,” she tells him, taking a wad of cash to fan herself a bit.  The little whispers of hair around her neck shiver from the breeze, and Steve can feel himself getting hard.  “From what I hear, most pay her twenty, so maybe that tongue of your is good for something after all.”

Bucky’s grin is filthy.  “You should know.”

Peggy rolls her eyes a bit, but Steve can see the way her fingers tremble for just the briefest second.

It’s already nearly midnight, but they drink until two, brown bottles of beer and a clear bottle of moonshine split between them as they lounge on furniture that does not belong to them.  Bucky tells stories about Steve as a kid until Steve blushes and tells him to shut up, threatens to tell Peggy about the time Mary Ellen’s father caught Bucky in his daughter’s bedroom and Bucky was forced to run back home with nothing but a copy of _The Evening Standard_ over his bits.

Bucky just smiles and tells Peggy the story himself.

Buck always was shameless.

 

\--

 

The darkness is being split by the dawn, the birds outside making a terrible racket when he hears the door to his room open over them.

It’s Peggy.  She slips quietly into the room and climbs right onto the bed.  “Peggy-” he starts to say, his vocal chords cutting out as she flops down onto him a bit, her face burrowing into his neck.  Steve’s heart is racing so hard it actually hurts, a sore ache under his ribs.

She leans up enough that she can take his hand and guide it up between her thighs, slipping it down into her panties.  Steve’s felt up a few girls, gotten his hands down into their underwear before, but it’s never felt like this.

“Said he wants you to finish the job,” Peggy says.  She leans down and bites at his mouth, and the gasp he lets out surprises him.  He can smell the liquor on her breath, and suddenly feels guilty.  Peggy is drunk.  “Little bastard got me all worked up and then just-”

Steve’s fingers slip against her and she lets out a pained moan.  God, she’s so, so wet; it’s messy on his palm.  It feels like Bucky must have spent a day’s age working her up, been a terrible tease.  Steve knows this is wrong: she’s not his, she’s probably drunk and out of her mind, coming to him out of pure desperation.  But Steve doesn’t pretend he’s a good man anymore, and when she starts to plead quietly, he lets two of his fingers slide inside of her.  Peggy rides his fingers, his other hand coming to the small of her back to steady her, feeling the tremors of her spine as she uses him.

He’s struck again by how beautiful and strong she is, even here, sweaty and half-wild with desperation.

“ _Thank you, thank you, thank you_ ,” she whispers over and over as she shakes overtop of him, her body quivering with pleasure as she comes.  He falls asleep with her like that, the exchange of their chests - her breath in, his breath out - reminding him of when Bucky used to do it during Steve’s asthma attacks when they were boys.

 

\--

 

Bucky’s drinking coffee the next morning.  The cabinets in the kitchen have been opened and ransacked.  There are two cups on the table - one in front of Bucky, the second in front of the empty chair that Steve drops into.

“What’re you doing?” Steve asks, leaning back in the rickety chair.  Peggy was gone when he woke up, only the slight tackiness on his hand evidence that what happened in the pre-dawn hours wasn’t a dream.  It wouldn’t have been the first.

Peggy’s not a morning person - she won’t be up for another few hours, so it’s just the two of them, sitting around the low, chipped table in the kitchen.

“Drinkin’ coffee,” Bucky says, his eyes narrow.  It’s the look he employs when he knows Steve is going to push an issue that he doesn’t want to talk about.  Steve’s seen it more times over the years he’s known Bucky than he can count.

“You know what I mean,” Steve says.  “She’s your girl.”

This is another look that Steve instantly recognizes, the kind that Bucky gives him when he’s said or done something particularly stupid.  He used to throw it at Steve every time he’d take on the Mackerney boys that sat on the corner near Pickham’s Deli, harassing girls and pickpocketing, earning himself black eyes and nasty scrapes until Bucky put ‘em down hard one day.  The oldest one, Franky, still walks with a bit of a limp.

(It had been the day after Franky had broken one of Steve’s ribs, put him in the hospital. _I ain’t never seen him like that before,_ Rebecca had told Steve after, watching as the nurses fussed with the bandages around his ribs.   _They had to pull him off of Franky covered in blood.  I thought Bucky was gonna kill him_.)

“You really don’t know women, do you?” he says roughly.  “If you think that girl is any man’s, you got a rude awakening coming for you, buddy.  Best you just accept what she’s willing to give you and make sure she enjoys it plenty.”

The next words are spoken into the cup, mumbled to the point where he can barely recognize them. “Besides, I’m the consolation prize.”

 

\--

 

Peggy doesn’t say a word about it.

Instead, she guns the engine in Lincoln and tells them to keep their bloody heads down as she weaves through the country lanes, the sound of a siren growing fainter.

Three counties over, she pulls the ring she wears on her right hand over to the left and drags Steve into the office of the shifty little motel they find near Lake Russel.  She smiles as she charms the office attendant into giving the newlyweds a great deal on their honeymoon suite, and tells him he looks just like her brother Jimmy with a smile that looks genuine to most, but like brittle glass to Steve.

As he fills out the small registration form with their fake married names (Mr and Mrs. Reginald Burdette from Clearfield, Missouri), he finds her staring at the band of silver he always keeps on his left ring finger.

 

\--

 

One job in Kentucky has the cops on them so thick they don’t dare pull the normal scheme of bunking in a motel or lodge house under the guise of a married couple, the third sneaking into the room when prying eyes have closed to sleep.  Instead, Bucky pulls over in the middle of an endless score of worked wheat fields, hiding the car in a thatch of overgrown forest between two of them.

They bunk out there in one of the fields, the three of them spread across a blanket they found in the last car they stole, Bucky between the two of them, one arm bent back beneath his head and the other curled around Peggy’s shoulders as she sleeps, her body pressed into him.

“Remember when we used to do this on the roof of Flannigan’s butcher shop?” Bucky asks, turning his head enough that he can look Steve in the eye.

Steve chuckles lowly as he remembers them sneaking up to the rooftop on particularly hot nights, laid out watching the stars and catching the breeze that never seemed to reach in their bedroom windows.

They did a lot more up there than stargaze.  The first time Bucky rolled over and put his hand down Steve’s boxers had been the first time anyone had ever touched him like that, the first time he had come by someone else’s hand or mouth.

Steve runs his thumb over Bucky’s mouth, the fat bump of his bottom lip, and watches his eyes go dark.  “Yeah, Buck.” And god, he wants to kiss him so badly.  “I remember.”

When Steve does kiss him, Bucky opens right up, his mouth pliant and obedient in a way it never is when they’re not like this.  Bucky kisses him back lazily, his hands gently carding through Peggy’s hair as she breathes against their now joined chests.

 

\--

 

A windfall in Montana.

It’s a relatively small Sanders & Son outpost, but the vault they hit, unbeknownst to them, is carrying the payroll for the entire northwest.

Almost three thousand dollars.

That gets a pretty target painted on their back.  They head south for a few weeks to lay low, tuck the money in a box at a rural bank that doesn’t ask questions.

“It was a bad idea,” Peggy says, sitting on the hood of their car as Bucky takes shots at coke bottles lined up on the fence of an abandoned farm.  “The haul was too big.  They’re going to be looking for us for a long while out here.”  She winces as she hears the glass shatter, patting down the fan of the skirt of her dress.  The one thing Peggy does not like is guns; she has begrudgingly accepted them as part of what they do, but Steve can tell that they still unnerve her in a profound way.  Steve shares her dislike of them (he carries one only to scare, only to back up Bucky if it came to that, but the metal in his palm makes his guilt threefold every time), but Bucky does not.  Even growing up, Bucky was a crack shot with a bb gun.

Steve nods and hoists himself up beside her.  The hood is still a bit warm from the dying sun as it sinks into the west.  

She stares at him for a moment like she’s contemplating him, her eyes raking back forth over him.  “I don’t understand it.”

“What?”

There’s an unreadable expression on her face.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t understand why.  Bucky… he’s got a bit of wild to him.  But you?”  She reaches out and runs the side of a finger against the cut of his jaw.  “Your heart’s too good for this, Rogers.”

He doesn’t know why this angers him, but it does.  In truth, it’s always something he’s wanted to believe, something parroted to him by Bucky, but he’s never been able to swallow it.  Good men don’t do this.  Good men don’t choose this life.  Good men die at war as heroes, like his father.  Good men make hard choices.  Steve is not a good man.

“It’s really not.”  He moves away from her hand, catching it with his own and bringing it down to the cornflower yellow of her dress.  “And I’ve never been much use at anything else.”

Her eyebrow raises at that, her mouth bent into the sort of smile a mother gives to her petulant, combative child.  When he tries to take his hand back, she clings to his fingers until he rests it back down against the fabric of her dress and the gentle curve of a thigh underneath.  “Now that’s just a bold-faced lie. Bucky showed me your sketches.  Talent like that doesn’t come along often.”

Steve’s stuck somewhere between shock and embarrassment, his mind milling over the image of Bucky sharing the battered sketchbook Steve keeps hidden in his pack.  His heart thumps as his memory conjures up all the clandestine sketches of Peggy and the ones of Bucky he’s got in there.  Bucky wouldn’t, would he?

He calms his breathing enough to say, “Doesn’t matter, does it?  Ain’t much call for artists these days.  Besides, not good enough to do much with it.  Just end up living three to a room near the docks, sketching soulless portraits of tourists for a nickel a pop.”

Peggy’s mouth curls like she wants to fight him on this point, but she doesn’t.  She just swings her calves back and forth over the side of the car, making her thigh shift under Steve’s hand.

“And you?  Why are you here?” Steve asks.  He’s not sure if she’ll give him a straight answer, but he’s never really asked before.

Her eyes track over to Bucky who’s walking to the fence, placing a fresh line of bottles on the rotting wood.  She’s quiet for a second, then turns to look at Steve.

“Doesn’t matter, does it?”

In the distance, another bottle shatters.

 

\--

 

They get drunk in Kansas.  After night falls, Bucky sneaks into the room of Mr and Mrs. Ian Conway of Silverthorne, Colorado.  He walks in the door and falls face first onto the bed in front of them, holding up two big bottles of liquor with a mischievous smile.

“Kansas is too bloody flat,” Peggy complains, taking one of the bottles and lifting it to her mouth.  Bucky takes a pull off the other bottle before tipping it toward Steve with a smile, his arms slithering over both their legs.

They all get sloppy drunk, which always makes Bucky extra handsy.  He’s got one palm around Steve’s bare ankle when he tugs Peggy up to him, her wobbly laugh a little too loud, which makes Steve sober for the briefest second.  The motel they’re in is actually much nicer than most of the places they end up, but the walls still look thin as butcher paper.

Steve sobers even more when he meets Bucky’s eyes and sees nothing but black there, dark and intense.  He’s got his mouth right up against the soft skin below Peggy’s ear, whispering something to her that Steve can’t hear.  Whatever it is, it makes Peggy let out a ragged breath, a light shiver running down her body.

 _Go on_ , he hears Bucky whisper as he nuzzles into her neck, a quick flash of tongue before he’s untangling himself from her and helping her reach for Steve.

And then Peggy is kissing him, her mouth so soft and beautiful against his.  In that hot apartment months ago, she had only bitten his lip as he had slipped his fingers into her.  This is the first time he’s had her mouth, and he finds himself growing lightheaded at the thought of never leaving it, of getting lost in it.  Lost in her.

His eyes are closed, so he feels her move rather than sees it.  It’s a fluid movement with enough power behind it that when Peggy lands in his lap and he can feel the length of Bucky’s arm brush his abdomen as he pulls it away, Steve is not surprised.

They neck for a while, Steve’s hands taking liberties over her hips and across her breasts, feeling the weight of things as she sighs into his mouth and tugs gently at his hair.  Steve feels like he is coming undone.

“Have you ever been with a woman?” she asks him as she pushes him back against the pillows and follows him down with her body, but the words are saturated in nothing but objective kindness, not an ounce of judgement to them.

He knows that deep down, most men would be offended.  But she’s just reading this wrong, reading the nervous twitch of his hand as the nerves of inexperience.

Peggy’s not his first woman.  The first was a woman that he’s pretty sure Bucky paid to bed him.  Her name was Suzie, and she was sweet, patient, and didn’t seem to mind that he had absolutely no idea what on god’s green earth he was doing.  He lasted ten seconds the first time, but she had spent the better part of two days in bed with him, teaching him how to wring pleasure out of her with his hands, his mouth, and his cock.

There had been women after, too, small assignations after jobs, before they brought Peggy into the fold.  But he’s never wanted any of them the way that he wants Peggy, this sustained, overwhelming mix of desire, need and unbound affection that lives within him.  It lives inside of him next to the part that will always belong to Bucky.

Peggy takes him in that hotel room in Kansas, her hair wild and eyes calm, Bucky’s quiet voice and hands grounding the both of them.  Bucky curls next to Steve as she rides him, whispers affirmations when Peggy moans and begs for more, tells him when to touch her, when to push her to make more of those sounds that Steve thinks he could spend a lifetime listening to.  Bucky knows Peggy’s body and responses well enough that it makes Steve wonder about all the times Peggy must have taken Bucky, about the noises she must have wrung out of him.  That’s enough to make him come, his back bending hard enough it feels ready to snap.  It feels so good that he drifts into a haze, the warm spread of his orgasm making him boneless.

He comes back to himself only long enough to watch Bucky lift up beside him, his hand slipping between Peggy’s legs, brushing up against Steve as he softens inside of her.  She’s almost there; Steve can feel it, hear it in sharpness of her breath as Bucky finishes her off.

Steve listens to the beautiful sound of Peggy coming.

 

\--

 

Peggy makes them eat crab cakes from a seaside shack in Maryland.  She says it reminds her of home, though Steve doesn’t ask her which.  Bucky wanders off to the shore afterward, kicking off his shoes and rolling up his pant legs before drifting out into the surf.

Peggy and Steve watch him from the low, sandy hill that lines the beach, passing a bottle of cider between them.  Bucky’s always loved the water.

For a second, Steve can almost believe that this is a vacation, that the car they dumped back in Dover doesn’t have bullet holes punched through the passenger side door, that when they’re done, they’ll be heading back to Brooklyn instead of running further west to escape the authorities who are now looking for two men travelling with a woman.

“This life,” Steve says abruptly before his mind can even think to stop the words.  “There’s no happy endings here.”

When she answers, the sadness in her voice is overwhelming.  It is then that Steve realizes how little he really knows about Peggy’s past, how she lives as though she didn’t exist before she walked into the bar Steve and Bucky had chosen to lie low in nearly a year ago.  There are no tales of her family, no fond childhood memories like the ones that Steve and Bucky share constantly.

“There are no happy endings to any life, Steve.”

They leave an hour later when an Atlantic storm blows ashore.

 

\--

 

The cops are waiting for them in New Jersey.

By the time they get across the state line, Peggy’s got a bullet in her shoulder and Bucky’s bleeding out across Steve’s lap in the backseat.

 

\--

 

There’s a doctor that Peggy knows.  He’s older, and Peggy calls him Colonel when he shows up at the door of the farmhouse they rented a week ago as a safehouse.  There’s a disapproving look in his eye as he assesses her and Steve, but he comes in and takes to patching up Bucky without a word.  By the end, there’s so much blood on the kitchen floor it looks like they’ve painted it red.

“Peggy,” Steve says, finally getting a good look at her shoulder once they’ve got Bucky resting in one of the bedrooms upstairs.  There’s blood dripping down her arm and her blouse has torn enough that he can see how nasty the wound is.  She must be in pain, but she made not a peep as they tended to Bucky.

"It's okay," Peggy says.

"It's not," Steve answers, pulling out one of the kitchen chairs.  When she won't sit in it, he lowers himself into the chair and pulls her down into his lap.  Taking down the fabric of her shirt, he can see there's no exit wound.  The bullet is still stuck inside her.

“Colonel,” Steve says to the man, motioning for him to come over.

“Phillips, son,” he replies, setting his bag down on the table beside them. “My name is Phillips.”

Steve holds her still while Phillips pulls out the bullet.  Peggy doesn’t even flinch.  She doesn’t cry out, doesn’t move away from the tweezers Phillips is digging into her flesh.  But he can see the tears in the corner of her eyes, the way she savages her bottom lip with the pain.

Steve holds her against him and lets the exchange of their chests soothe her.

She breathes in, he breathes out.

 

\--

 

The next day, Bucky runs a fever so hot it nearly scalds Steve when he touches him.  Peggy strips him and Steve carries him to the tub she’s filled with cold water.  The fight Bucky puts up at the shock of the cold water is so weak that it frightens Steve.

After, Peggy dresses him in a fresh pairs of boxers and changes the bandaging on the wounds.  She gives him a shot that Phillips left with them, running her hand across his sweaty brow.

There’s a finesse to the way she administers it that tells him immediately that she is no layman.  

“You’ve done this before,” Steve says, and watches the way her hands quiet on Bucky’s face.  She doesn’t say yes, but he knows that it’s true.  He imagines her as a nurse once, maybe.  A war medic, perhaps.  She has the quiet competence that speaks of formal training.

When she finishes, Steve forces her down onto the bed in the spare bedroom, delicately removing the dressing on her wound and checking for the signs of infection that Phillips warned him about.  When he finds none, he places a clean bandage over the wound, his thumb rubbing against the pale, smooth skin around it.

“I’m sorry.”

Peggy looks deeply unhappy at his words.  “What the bloody hell are you apologizing for?”

It’s been eating him up for the last day, that Bucky nearly bled to death and Peggy took a bullet while he walked away with nothing but their blood on his hands.  She stares at him as if she knows this as well.  It should frighten him how well she can slip into his mind, but it doesn't; it was the same with Bucky.

“You take such responsibility for the choices of others, Steve.”  Her voice is stern, almost scolding, but she slides her hand over his where it’s still pressed into the warm skin of her chest.  “I don’t want your apologies.  And neither does Bucky.”

She leans up and kisses him like she can make it right, but she can't.

 

\--

 

Bucky’s recovery is slow.  

There’s a terrible night three days in where Steve’s sure they’re gonna lose him, Bucky’s breathing so faint Steve can barely see the rise of his chest, and he finally loses it.  The plaster in the spare bedroom is rife with bloody fist marks and the door is half off its hinges before he calms down, and Peggy doesn’t say a word while patching up the mess he’s made of his knuckles.  She lets him cry when she’s done, one hand at the back of his neck and another running through his hair like his Ma and Bucky used to do when he’d get bronchitis each year, his body too weak to fight off the infection.

Steve makes a lot of promises that night.  To himself.  To the god he hasn’t really believed in since his Ma died.

He falls asleep curled around Bucky while Peggy sits back against the headboard, Bucky’s head resting against her hip.

Steve wakes to the feeling of Bucky’s fingers in his hair.

 

\--

 

“Where to, Jeeves?” Bucky asks from the backseat.  He’s spread out across it with Peggy, barking orders now that Steve has slipped behind the steering wheel.  It only took a few days for his smartmouth to return, and Steve can't say he minds one bit.

“I was thinking Florida,” Steve says.  They’ve got a good store of money down there, some connections that can help them stay low and quiet.  He hasn’t really broached the topic of stopping with them, but he made himself a promise, watching Peggy bleed and Bucky struggle to breathe.  Bucky will fight him when he finally figures it out, but Steve's never shrunk from a battle and he doesn't plan to start now.  “Made some promises.”

“You hear that, doll?” Bucky says, his mouth resting against the top of Peggy’s head.  She’s leaning against him, her body between his legs, her arm still slung up against her chest.  Once out of the woods, Bucky’s wounds healed up fast and good.  They weren’t as lucky with Peggy’s shoulder, which refused to heal right; she’s not the type to complain, but he knows the pain’s been getting worse, and Bucky, despite his own infirmity, has been doting on her as hard as Steve has been.  “He made promises.”

“I did.”  Peggy catches his eye in the rearview mirror and smiles softly as Bucky mumbles something else against her temple.  Steve feels the ache return to his chest, like his ribs are protesting the sudden emptiness there; his heart is resting in the backseat between them.  “Best let him keep them, I’d say.”

Bucky winks at Steve as he turns the engine over.  “You’re the boss.”

 

 


End file.
